Outside, in the courtyard, it took the mother two trips around the fountain to capture the squealing little girl and return with her to the grandmother, who gathered up the wriggling child, and then all three went back inside, leaving Sully alone with a woman who wasn’t there. When the fist in his chest clenched, he closed his eyes against the discomfort until it loosened.
“Here’s something you might get a kick out of,” Sully said, returning the watch to his pocket. For some reason he was determined to talk to Vera as if she were actually there. “Turns out I’ve got this heart problem. Don’t laugh. I do have one. I only know because it’s fritzed.”
Had she really been present, Vera no doubt would have observed that it never had worked properly, a criticism that Sully could accept as a given.
“I’ve got a while yet,” he told her. “A year or two, they say, but they’re full of shit. Could be any day, is what it feels like. They want to put this thing in my chest. A defibrillator. They claim it would keep me going awhile longer, assuming I don’t die on the table. The question that stumps them is why. I can’t work. These days I just mostly get in the way. So what’s the point?”
This time when he glanced over at her he got the very distinct impression the ward nurse had warned him about, the sense that an interior light had come on. A second later, though, it was extinguished again, and all that remained was the physical husk.
“Got you stumped, too, huh?” The shadows in the courtyard were lengthening. “Don’t worry,” he told her, “I’ll figure it out. Meanwhile, what do you say we sit here a minute, just you and me. I don’t think we ever did that, did we? Just sit anywhere quietly?”
He awoke to a light touch on his wrist, and for a fraction of a second he was sure it was Vera, though of course it was the girl from the hallway coming to tell him that visiting hours were over. Like last call in a bar, he thought. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.
—
SATURDAY NIGHT and once again the Horse was hopping, but the stool next to Carl Roebuck was vacant for Sully to climb aboard. “You’re in a good mood,” Sully said, once his friend swiveled to face him.
“I bet you could figure out why, if you put your mind to it.”
Sully was about to say he had no fucking clue why a man so far up Shit’s Creek would be in such good spirits, then he realized that he did. “Congratulations. You’re not going to show me, I hope.”
“It’s not hard right this second,” Carl admitted. “In a million years you wouldn’t guess who gave it to me.”
“Give me a hint,” Sully demanded. “Man or woman?”
“Audrey Hepburn. Fully clothed.”
“I told you porn wasn’t the answer.”
“Audrey Hepburn,” Carl repeated, his voice full of wonder. “Hey, you think she ever did any porno?”
Sully just looked at him.
“Okay, Katharine, then,” Carl said. “Either one. Pick any Hepburn.” When Sully declined to answer, he grew serious. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just heard about Ruth.”
That had been the worst part of Sully’s day, actually. Everywhere he’d gone people kept telling him how sorry they were, as if they were married, which yet again brought home to him how profoundly he’d intruded into her family. Could he blame Ruth for thinking the time had come for him to move along?
Birdie set a beer in front of him and said it was on the house. “They find that asshole yet?”
“Not as of half an hour ago,” Sully told her. There’d been a pay phone in the lobby of the county home, so he’d made a couple calls. One to the police station — learning that Roy Purdy was still at large — and the other to the hospital, where the intensive-care nurse informed him that Ruth’s condition was unchanged. Yes, her husband and daughter and granddaughter were there. He’d been thinking about going over, but decided instead to make them a gift of his absence.
“The way I heard it,” Birdie said, “he’d have killed her if you hadn’t showed up.” Clearly, she was trying to make him feel better, so Sully didn’t object. Nor did he point out the obvious — that he’d saved Ruth’s life only if she did manage to survive.
One of the waitresses came over and handed him a folded note that read, in a surprisingly elegant hand: I win this bet. Leaning back on his stool, Sully peered into the dining area and saw Bootsie Squeers all dolled up, waving at him with a smug grin. The tree limb, of course. He’d forgotten, just as she’d known he would. He didn’t immediately recognize the man across the table from her. Did Rub own a sport coat? A shirt with a collar? Shoes that weren’t work boots? “I’ll take their check,” he told Birdie.
Carl had followed his gaze. “That,” he said, once they were turned back around, “is one homely woman.”
“Aw, be nice,” Sully said.
“I was being nice.”
“Did it ever occur to you,” Sully asked, “that in your next life you might be an unattractive woman?”
“Or an insect?” Birdie offered helpfully, passing by.
“Hey, that’s one of the books they tried to get me to read in college,” Carl called after her. “Where the guy wakes up convinced he’s a cockroach?”
“Guess who I ran into this afternoon,” Sully said when Birdie was out of earshot. “Clive Jr.”
“You’re shitting me. Here in Bath?”
“Claims he flew in for the middle-school dedication.”
“From where?”
“Someplace out west.”
“How did he seem?”
Broken. Unhappy. Haunted. Though at the beginning he’d tried hard to appear otherwise. Oh, sure, he admitted, things had been a little tough, but eventually he’d landed on his feet. He was married, happily, to a woman named Gale, whom he was sorry his mother never had a chance to meet. He’d done some other things for a while, but was finally back in banking, starting out at a small branch office until his work there had been noticed. Now he was at regional headquarters, in charge of special projects. The West was booming, he informed Sully. People living in backwaters like Bath had no idea what the rest of the country was like. He understood now why the Ultimate Escape deal had collapsed. There were just far-better places for investors to invest. He explained all this to Sully with the air of someone who fully expected to be disbelieved, so when Sully said, “Good. I’m happy for you,” he reacted as if Sully was being sarcastic, which wasn’t the case. At least he didn’t think it was.
“So,” the junior Clive finally said, dropping the boosterism. “A stroke is what I heard.”
He nodded. “A bunch of little ones, at first. Then—”
“God lowered the boom.”
Sully couldn’t help smiling, since this had been one of Miss Beryl’s favorite expressions.
“No pain, then?”
“Not so far as I know. Not that she would’ve said anything.”
“You looked after her?”
“I looked in on her, if that’s what you mean.” Every morning he’d poke his head in to see if she needed anything. Either that or she’d thump on the ceiling with her broom handle and he’d come down. Occasionally he let her talk him into drinking a cup of tea with her at the kitchen table, claiming, as always, to hate her beverage of choice. Some days he’d find her confused and know she’d suffered another ministroke, but she knew what they were and what to expect. She wasn’t afraid, so far as Sully could tell. Just puzzled as to why God was taking his own sweet time.
“I don’t suppose she talked much about me?”
“No,” Sully told him. “Your name didn’t come up.” Which was true.
“She could be one tough lady,” Clive said, sullen now. “Not that you’d know anything about that, being her favorite.”